Photos & Thoughts

Tag Archives: sand

Last weekend, myself and the family took a trip down to Symondsbury, Dorset. The occasion was the marriage of my sister-in-law which was to be held in Symondsbury Manor on Saturday 12th May. The drive down was terrible with rain and wind for the whole journey. This coupled with the unseasonably low temperatures made us question whether or not we should have brought full winter attire. However, it would appear that the weather gods were being kind to us and from the Friday through to Sunday evening we were blessed with glorious sunshine and temperatures even topping the high teens (centigrade to any American readers!).

The day after the wedding we took a trip down to Hive Beach which is about a 15 minute drive from the village of Symondsbury. The beach is unusual in that there is little to no sand, only very smooth and small pebbles. I came to the conclusion that stones of this size we much more difficult to walk on than sand – finding this out as I took a stroll down the beach to check out the photo ops.

The children really enjoyed themselves, although Mia was uncertain about going for a paddle – despite Lou’s best efforts!

The pictures below were taken with a Canon 7D with a 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM MkII lens. The lens was hired for the purpose of taking the wedding photos (some of which will be uploaded once the bride and groom have vetted them!) but was an ideal lens for photographing children playing; allowing me to get close ups without having to intrude on their personal space.

I’ve only included a few photos to showcase the set that is posted on Flickr.

The Apple 12 days of Christmas app available on iTunes has given away some fantastic free apps this year. One such app is the photograph editing application Snapseed. I’ve been using it on my iPad for a few days now to edit photos from various trips as it allows me to quickly edit and upload. One of the nice features, which I have yet to find in an OS X application, is the ability to add creative effects and frames/borders to my images. I usually edit my photographs on my iMac using Aperture. Aperture is amazingly powerful but unless you add various plug-ins, most of which involve parting with cash, adding some effects or borders requires exporting to another application- usually photoshop.

I’ll continue to use Aperture as it also serves as a great way to sort and catalogue my vast image library. However, I’ve since downloaded another photo editing application from the Mac App Store called Photo Effect Studio Pro, which allows the editing and manipulation of Canon raw files (.cr2) to create images similar to the ones posted today. My workflow will have to change a little as it will require the raw file to be exported from Aperture before being opened in Photo Effect Studio Pro, but realistically this won’t result in much extra time being spent on editing images. I’ll post some shots in due course and you can let me know what you think…